As the days pass slowly by in this long Presidential campaign season, the electorate seems poised to elect its first Black American president. Take a deep breath and think about that for a moment, the United States of America, a country that only fifty years ago still labored under the unjust and inhuman mantel of Jim Crow and all that it meant and means is poised to elect its first Black President.

We as a nation have come a long way since the days when Black American were third-class citizens in all but name and confined to consuming the vile hatred served up by Whites. And we are no means done squaring the racial pie, but we as a society have come a long way if a Black man can win the hearts and minds of White America. And make no mistake Barack Obama has a broad cross-section of this nations peoples looking past the color bar at the contents of his character and not the color of his skin. Martin Luther King would be proud, and so am I to support this man.

Within Obama’s soaring inspirational rhetoric, hope floats and touches an optimistic (hopeful) cord in (almost) everyone who listens to the beauty and strength of his words. Correlations to John F. Kennedy were inevitable, but Obama is very much his own man who seems to believe in the power of “We The People,” to effect change and fashion the government the Preamble to our fabled Constitution and Declaration of Independence promised; i.e. a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.

It is Abraham Lincoln who stated in how now famed Gettysburg Address of 1863 that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," but “We The People” have to pay attention and care what OUR government is doing in OUR name(s), or it shall. The President, the Congress, and the Courts are but care takers of OUR government. Moneyed narrowly focused special interest groups have in the last decades hijacked OUR government and used it for their own enrichment. The evidence of that hostile take-over is written across the American landscape in personal hardship, hard times, lost jobs, misplaced promises, bus rides to the Canadian border to buy prescription drugs, unchecked illegal immigration, a collapsing infrastructure, non-existent energy policy, unjust wars, neglected and demoralized Veterans, crime-ridden inner cities, falling home prices, declining American prestige around the globe, and crumbling American institutions here at home.

I don’t think I am going out on a limb to state that “We The People” are tired and fast losing hope and belief in the American dream, and indeed in America herself. The Grand Experiment is failing and those we have thus far elected to mind the store have been robbing us blind to enrich themselves and their fellows. But Barak represents a chance, however fleeting, to change at least some of that equation. He wants to give the government back to “We The People in order to form a more perfect Union.” He wants to “provide for common defense, promote the general welfare” of a nation in slow decline by any measure.

We are no longer the greatest nation; our shinning light has dimmed; Barak seeks to light it anew. And the message he is espousing is that he cannot do it alone, it will take “We The People” as a collective in league with him and his government to restore the luster and gleam to the American Dream, the American idea, the American promise of equal justice for all and not just the privileged few.

Vincent E. Martin a.k.a. ~DarkBard~
thebard62@earthlink.net